Eat, drink and be Murray

September 16 2002

Picture: ANGELA WYLIEStefano de Pieri: "One
day, I'd like to live on
the land."

Under a cobalt sky Stefano de Pieri is driving out of Mildura and towards a tree an hour's drive away. Not just any tree, though: it's a 700-year-old river redgum he wants to show us, a tree, he points out, that was a sapling when Dante was writing The Divine Comedy.

But first we drop in at his house, which sits on the bank of the Murray River. "I want to show you why I live in Mildura," he says. Today a group of ducks float around the river's milky-green water. In the garden, with its willow and peppercorn trees, there's a dining table and chairs on a little raised deck. To get here, we have driven past kilometres of orange trees studded with fruit ready for picking, avocado hanging heavy and rows of green-silver olive trees. "Do you think I want to live in the city?"

We arrive at the tree. It's enormous, gnarled, misshapen, shedding bark in untidy bits and weeping sap into baseball-mitt sized balls. "I come and pay homage to this," de Pieri says. "People should take bits of it away, like pieces of the Cross."

Spend a day with Stefano de Pieri, whose restaurant in Mildura has just been named The Age Good Food Guide's restaurant of the year, and you begin to experience the intensity of feeling de Pieri has for so much of what he sees in life. He will be driving and suddenly, there's no other way to put it, he will be shouting.

Some examples: he's passionately for ancient trees, fresh produce, real bread, slow food, careful management of finite water resources and fighting salinity and land degradation around the Murray.");document.write("

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He's passionately against the way the border-protection debate has been mangled by politics, a culture of children being "inducted" into unhealthy foods such as over-processed "white death" bread, and the manner in which the State ALP in the 1980s sent the state broke.

Put it this way: it's an entertaining two-and-a-half-hour round trip in the Alfa.

If Stefano de Pieri, a former political adviser from the socialist left of Labor politics, is an owner and manager of Victoria's restaurant of the year, then the restaurant's location 600 kilometres from Melbourne is even more incongruous.

The restaurant, down in the cellar beneath the Grand Hotel, has become a tourist attraction. There has always been resistance from locals, who have blanched at the Melbourne prices, so mainly it's out-of-towners, wine reps, lawyers on circuit, food writers.

People who enjoyed his book and TV series come a long way to eat here. Major detours are made by road from Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide and many fly in for the experience. It's a pilgrimage. And it's the biggest thing to happen to Mildura since the 1980 discovery 100 kilometres away of Mungo Man, 40,000-year-old skeletal remains. "Some people come here just to go to Stefano's, but they stay a week," says Allan Murphy, editor of the local paper The Sunraysia Daily.

Today, de Pieri is asked to pose for a photo with tourists from Warrnambool. He's used to rock-star receptions, but success appears not to have changed him.

"He mixes in such diverse circles," says his friend Labor MP Carlo Carli. "His mates are poets, musicians, politicians, cooks and working-class people ... He knows a lot of people with calluses on their hands, but also important people in the arts."

De Pieri's journey from the town of Treviso in northern Italy, near Venice, which he left aged 19, is an extraordinary one. He arrived in Melbourne in 1974, and with limited English found himself living in the North Melbourne house of Bill and Lorna Hannan, academics with a keen sense of social justice and culture.

Instead of a monochrome Australia of white-bread conservatism, the politically-aware teenager experienced the beginnings of multicultural Australia and the reforms of the Whitlam era.

De Pieri was in heaven: late nights in Lygon Street with red wine and long discussions about politics. "I arrived in a social and cultural milieu which was just amazing," he says.

He remembers his first trip into a national park, where he thinks he offended a group of friends by saying the bush was ugly. "I didn't mean it like that, I meant it was ancient, gnarly, contorted. It's not the European idea of a green carpet and an oak tree. They thought I didn't like it but I was besotted with the whole thing and have been ever since."

In 1980, he and a group of friends set up a restaurant co-op in Brunswick. "I ran the kitchen and I knew nothing," he says. The co-op failed, but a serious interest in food and cooking had been ignited.

"It was a real place to be on a Sunday evening," says Carlo Carli, who was de Pieri's best man. "And it was a genuinely good restaurant. Most of us were in it for the talk rather than the food, but Stefano was in it for the food as well."

In the 1980s, de Pieri's fascination with politics led him to a job in the Department of Ethnic Affairs. For a time he advised the then premier when John Cain took on the portfolio in 1990. "He was an effervescent person who got things done," Cain remembers now. "Stefano was and probably remains a political animal who is concerned about community values and a more equitable, decent society."

He was a social justice campaigner. "He's interested in people, workers, underdogs," says Richard Wynne, another Labor MP, who back then was also an adviser with de Pieri. "That's his politics. He maintains that fire."

In 1991 de Pieri sought preselection for the Labor heartland seat of Melbourne North, but was squeezed out after factional alliances were re-arranged. Even today his bitterness at what happened seems raw and unresolved.

"I was devastated. I was pissed off ... with the madness of the whole thing. It was part-and-parcel of the Labor Party. You should accept it. That's what the party's always done, cannibalised itself, over and over again. It's part of its family tradition ...

The quality of the people that ended up in parliament after the round of pre-selection was outrageous. I don't understand how anybody would have the desire to inflict such damage to their own organisation."

"He was angry because he thought he'd put in enough to deserve the opportunity," says Carlo Carli. "He genuinely sees himself as a representative for the large Italian community, so he felt that was an opportunity lost."

Even today, when he drives past Parliament House in Spring Street, he feels "a tinge of sadness".

Despite his personal affection for John Cain, who has visited the restaurant, de Pieri remains bitter about what happened in those dark Labor years, angry and uncomprehending about the financial scandals that engulfed the state.

"I love Mr Cain ... he is responsible for some extraordinary achievements. But I still have a sense of dissatisfaction ...

How could a party of reform, a Labor Party with no experience in money-handling in a big sense, how could it just naively think it would bankroll economic initiatives? We handed money out like confetti."

De Pieri, meanwhile, had married Donna Carrazza, who had grown up in Mildura. They married in Treviso, a wedding attended by former Labor colleagues including Carlo Carli and Labor finance minister Lynn Kosky.

"The wedding symbolised his passion for life," Carli says. "He had the best drinks, the best food, the best waiters."

"Stefano's gorgeous," says Kosky. "He's full of energy and ideas and even if you say 'No' to him he doesn't hear it."

Burned by the Labor Party he loved, his father-in-law, who owned the Grand Hotel in Mildura, suggested de Pieri travel north and put his passion for cooking into a business venture with the hotel.

De Pieri agreed. It was good for him - the quintessential inner-city type making a clear break - and good for Don Carrazza: he got his daughter back.

The move to Mildura surprised friends. "It was a shock because I was supporting him strongly for political office," says Carli. "I went to Mildura to see him and he'd come up with what to me seemed like a hare-brained idea of doing a restaurant in the cellar. He said, 'I don't want people to have a choice, I want to tell them what to eat'."

But doubts were soon swept away. De Pieri transformed a standard country hotel kitchen into the finely-tuned operation it is today.

In a "cathartic" moment, "I chucked out margarine, horrible oil, animal fat. One day I remember I poured the contents of the whole kitchen in the middle of the floor ...

It's taken 10 years to put the linen on the table, the right glass, the right cutlery, a bit of background music, some good bread, some oil. I had to make the bread, because there is no bread here. I had to make the oil. I had to start completely from scratch ... in the bush, because it's always been, you have a roast, you have a steak, you have a glass of beer, you walk in and out with your dirty boots, it's fine, you know, the bush. Here people feel intimidated when they see the tablecloth. Gee, that's upmarket, I won't go in. I have to tell them the tablecloth is something they deserve and they're not paying a premium for.

"When I started working in Mildura I had no idea what I was doing and I had no clear agenda about putting food in regional Victoria," he says. "Things evolved and it's been punctuated by this exceptional event (the award)."

De Pieri became nationally famous in his ABC television series A Gondola on the Murray. Wearing a white Panama hat and riding a bicycle around his beloved Mildura, he brought attention to the Sunraysia district and put the city on the map. "When the program went to air, the restaurant was booked out for two years," de Pieri says. But when the ABC rejected his request for another series, he received no letter, no phone call. He is still bitter.

"The ABC cannibalises its own. It's not a particularly new story but when it happens to you, you get mightily pissed off. I was treated like an intruder."

The ABC experience reveals the angrier flipside to the amiable image. He tells a story about his friend, the poet Les Murray, writing a quartet of poems in praise of Mildura. When offered the poems for publication, the local paper passed on them. De Pieri confronted the editor. "I went insane," he says now. "I went troppo. Les Murray wrote an outrageously beautiful poem about Mildura, summing up the place in 40 lines ... We (he and the editor) didn't speak for ages after that. They say, 'Oh Stefano's Italian, he's passionate'. But I'm not passionate, I'm normal."

"It's water under the bridge," said editor Allan Murphy. "I've never held any grudge."

We sit for a late afternoon meal in his restaurant. De Pieri sits quietly. The cyclone is temporarily at rest - a rare thing, his friends say.

He's not rich. He lives, he says, "in the nooks and crannies between one payment and the next". "We've never gone backwards, but you can't say there's big money in hospitality. And it's a hard life. People burn out and get tired. We operate in a hotel so we're going seven days.

"But I do get to pick the kids up from school and run away sometimes. That's the good thing about the bush - you are always five minutes from home. Sometimes you can run away between main course and desert."

The future? He's renovating a paddle steamer into a floating cafe, he wants to spend more time in his restaurant's kitchen, he might plant some grapes on some land he's bought and he wants to be with his two children Domenico, 10, and Claudia, nine. He can't see himself heading back to the city.

"One day I'd like to live on the land, make broth, make some tortellini, put a chicken in the pot, have a few sheep, kill a lamb." He pauses. Maybe there's a little bit of the city boy left in him. "No, I don't like killing animals. I'll get someone else to do it."